re
free before the Revolution to carry on the rites of their faith. And
when the great anti-religious campaign began, many of them entered
whole-heartedly into the attack on all religious faiths, their own
included. Thus on the 21st Brumaire, whilst the Feasts of Reason were
taking place in the churches of Paris, we find "a deputation of
Israelites" presenting themselves at the National Assembly and
"depositing on the bosom of the Mountain the ornaments of which they had
stripped a little temple they had in the Faubourg Saint-Germain." At the
same moment--

A revolutionary committee of the Reunion brings to the general
council crosses, suns, chalices, copes, and quantities of other
ornaments of worship, and a member of this committee observes that
several of these effects belong to individuals of the Jewish race.
A minister of the religion of Moses, Abraham, and Jacob asks in the
name of his co-religionists that the said effects should not be
regarded as belonging to such and such a sect, ... this citizen is
named Benjamin Jacob.... Another member of the same committee pays
homage to the patriotic zeal of the citizens heretofore Jews, ...
almost all have forestalled the wish of the revolutionary committee
by themselves bringing their reliquaries and ornaments, amongst
others the famous cope said to have belonged to Moses.[634]

On the 20th Frimaire at "the Temple of Liberty," formerly the church of
the Benedictines, "the citizen Alexandre Lambert _fils_, a Jew brought
up in the prejudices of the Jewish religion," uttered a violent harangue
against all religions:

I will prove to you, citizens, that all forms of worship are
impostures equally degrading to man and to divinities; I will not
prove it by philosophy, I do not know it, but only by the light of
reason.

After denouncing the iniquities of both the Catholic and Protestant
faiths, Lambert demonstrates "the absurdities of the Jewish religion,
of this domineering religion"; he thunders against Moses "governing a
simple and agrarian people like all clever impostors," against "the
servile respect of the Jews for their kings ... the ablutions of women,"
etc. Finally he declares:

The bad faith, citizens, of which the Jewish nation is accused does
not come from themselves but from their priests. Their religion,
which would allow them only to lend to those of their nation